


to lead you to an overwhelming question

by prolix



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Relationship Study, Very Heavily Implied Cooper/TARS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 01:56:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10687404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prolix/pseuds/prolix
Summary: "You never told me what you saw out there, buddy." Coop tells him, softly, out on the porch one night."The data I collated from beyond the event horizon didn't survive the return trip," TARS says, "because I wasn't built for that shit. NASA doesn't make robots in five dimensions."Cooper nods, somber, and flips the beer bottle top in his palm between his fingers (one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, four - )"I'm telling myself that, too, slick," Cooper murmurs.+(And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I prayDo not go gentle into that good night,Rage, rage, against the dying of the light)





	to lead you to an overwhelming question

**Author's Note:**

> alternately titled "interstellar: the 'suffer through sentient robot emotions and a completely destroyed man's attempts at recovery with me' deleted scenes"
> 
> for context, I wrote this at three in the morning during an accidental all-nighter fueled by a frappuchino and my own seething hatred of how interstellar ended after my gorgeous beam of sunlight/sounding board bri introduced me to its three hour embrace of mental, emotional, and spiritual disembowelment.  
> a big thank you to her for spot-checking this monstrosity and giving me a crisis about robot pronouns.
> 
> fun drinking game: every time julie references other scifi movies in this story about a scifi movie, take a shot.
> 
> muse(ic) is o by coldplay  
> title from t. s. eliot's "the love song of j. alfred prufrock"  
> enjoy, and I love you!
> 
> * continuity note : this takes place in the time between murphy dying and cooper and tars stealthing their way into a ship to get to edmund's planet, and should follow canon well enough to be considered compliant outtakes
> 
> * obligatory warning label : themes and portayals of survivor's guilt, multiple symptoms of depression and ptsd, characters struggling with the aftermath of death and coping with death, and implied alcoholism/alcohol abuse
> 
> \- p

 

 

Cooper leans back against the little fold-out chair he'd set up on the porch of a ranch in the midwest US almost a hundred years ago, t-shirt slicked to his back with sweat. He presses the neck of his beer bottle to his lips like he's pressing a prayer into one of the beads of the rosary he kept in his flight suit back home, when the sky was blue and he flew up and up and up to meet it.  
(Once upon a time the sky was black and empty and screaming and he fell down and down and down - )  
He wishes he still had that goddamn iPod with the crickets and thunderheads breaking. He rubs a thumb, cooled by the condensation off of his Guinness (one hundred years and a whole solar system and they still give him fucking _Guinness_ \- ), into the knot above his temple. Damn headaches.  
"It's late. Would you like to come inside?" TARS asks from the screen door. Cooper looks straight ahead at the way the horizon curls upward like stubborn paper that's been rolled up too long, like a telescope pointed at nothing. The neighborhood's gone to bed. Across the station, the next work shift is just waking up.  
"Gimme a second," he says. Then, "what's the time?"  
"2025 hours, Coop. Give or take eight seconds."  
Cooper smiles. He presses another prayer to his beer bottle.  
It's a prayer that sounds like "Happy birthday, baby girl".  
(He's never prayed to gods beyond the ones of field and fertility, when dust was his religion. Tiny miracles is all he asks for: a drone to cannibalize to keep his kids from starving, a watch to sync with another, his wife's eyes in his childrens' faces and her wire-sharp mind in their voices, three hours on an event horizon, for one last fucking look at his children as a great unknowable void reaches up to swallow him whole like water in a tidal wave or dust in a stormfront and his survival instinct screams like Murph did in his truck at NASA's gates and Tom did on a video uplink when his baby died and - )  
This is day one.

+

Cooper rebuilds TARS.  
The robot's glitchy, can hold a smart-ass tet á tet with Coop until the sun goes down but sometimes starts rearranging syrup packets (corn syrup, for powdered coffee - coffee, pure, synthesized stimulation in a cup, dear baby _Jesus_ how he'd missed - ) into geometric designs Cooper can't understand and then shuts himself down for hours. He doesn't remember ever making them when he comes out of it.  
"You never told me what you saw out there, buddy." Coop tells him, softly, out on the porch one night.  
"The data I collated from beyond the event horizon didn't survive the return trip," TARS says, "because I wasn't built for that shit. NASA doesn't make robots in five dimensions."  
Cooper nods, somber, and flips the beer bottle top in his palm between his fingers (one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, four - )  
"I'm telling myself that, too, slick," Cooper murmurs.

+

They sit at the kitchen table and Cooper watches the dustless surface of it as though hypnotized. The first real clean thing, not counting the spaceworthy and space-pursuant, he's seen since he was a kid. Clothes that don't scrape skin raw. Blankets that don't make curls and plumes of swirling topsoil when you toss and turn at night. Lungs that don't heave and shift through endless debris to get to the slim pickings of oxygen beneath like some kind of starving animal. Tears that don't make tracks when Cooper breaks down and holds his head and sobs in awful, stomach-wrenching gasps, as though turning himself inside out with the force of it.  
_(Love transcends dimensions,_ Brand tells him with her starscape hair and eyes like the feral Earth-bound children they all are, smiling like she knows all the universe's secrets.  
_Fuck you_ , Cooper tells her, _so does pain.)_

+

Murphy is his ghost.  
Cooper is drunk and his dead daughter is haunting him from the space station he lives in named after her named after him.  
"Coop," TARS is saying, has been saying for two full minutes but he just won't _listen_ , "it's alright, it's just a book you just knocked over a book it's okay - "  
Cooper goes upstairs. Presses his back to his daughter's bedroom door. Shuts his eyes tight and ignores the sparks (because they look like the singularity but everything does it's always in the corner of his vision like a tsunami wave like a dust storm always always _always_ al - )  
"Coop," TARS says, and it's breaking him, Cooper can feel it in the cradle of his ribs that it hurts the robot to see him torn to pieces and soaked in alcohol and just waiting for a stray spark to go up in flames.  
"Honesty at ninety-nine percent," Cooper tells him, because it will hurt him to do this.  
(This'll sting but only a little because if it hurts that's good, honey, if it hurts you know it's working and then it can heal and then it can heal cuts heal and scar over, Murph, Tom, but void doesn't heal void pulls in everything around it to patch itself back together again and it becomes a fucking monster to do it but what else are you supposed to do when you've got a black hole in the core of you what do you do what do you _do - )_  
"Coop, please."  
"We died in that black hole, didn't we, TARS? We never came back."  
"That seems likely, yes."  
"And this? This whole thing? Some sort of fucked up fever dream we get to share until the afterlife sorts out the influx of customers queuing up at the pearly gates because we left millions of people to starve and suffocate on a planet that wanted them dead a hundred years ago, right? _Right?"_  
"Yes."  
Cooper laughs. He cups his hands to his mouth and laughs, as though trying to hold the sound inside, push it back into his throat and down into his chest where it can be smothered by the event horizon within him, drawn out into a thunderhead breaking by gravity and impossible dimensions.  
"I'm dead," Cooper gasps, eyes welling with tears as his body continues to shake with the laughter he's trapped inside of him. "I died on Mann's planet. All that fucking ammonia, didn't he say? I died there and you were the only one in that ship I could stand so I dragged you into this living hell with me. Honesty at a hundred percent."  
"I cannot - "  
"Honesty at zero percent. Lie to me, TARS. Tell me my baby boy's alright. Tell me Tom's still waiting to play catch with his dad outside right now."  
"This will hurt you."  
Cooper slams his head back against the door. The pain distracts from his building headache.  
"Lie to me, dammit," he says, quiet, eyes closed, trying to listen for crickets.  
There are no crickets on Earth. There haven't been since his parents were in school.  
"It's going to be alright," TARS whispers, lets him slump against one of the flat rectangular facets of his body. "It's going to be okay. It'll be okay, Coop."

+

(He lets TARS carry him downstairs that night, lay him out on the couch and bring him a blanket.  
"Honesty at ninety-five percent," Coop mumbles as he drifts.  
"Thank you," TARS says.  
In the morning, Cooper takes a double dose of aspirin and pulls every single book down from the shelves of Murph's bookcase.)

+

(What do the books spell?  
The books don't spell anything.  
He keeps S, T, A, Y, and the book that fell the day he left in a box under the sink. He tells himself he'll burn them. He doesn't.)

+

He reads about space travel.  
"The project head over at DARPA wants to know if you'd like to come meet - "  
_I don't want to meet anyone,_ Cooper thinks. _I just want to read._  
"The station's division of NASA want you to go - "  
_I can't go,_ Cooper thinks, _I'm trying to read._  
"Your granddaughter Cassie asked if you'd be able to - "  
_I'm not able to,_ Cooper thinks, _I'm reading._  
(Cassie's named after something, too, although Murphy was a little more subtle with name-picking when it came to her children than Cooper was with her.)  
(Cassie's named after Cassini, the first satellite sent by NASA to successfully collect images of Saturn.)  
Cooper sits on the porch and reads about the moon landing.

+

"What are they teaching kids in school these days, slick?"  
"The hell should I know?"  
"Before I joined up, they wanted to replace the textbooks on the moon landing with some bullshit about American propaganda. Wonder what they'll revise next, the _Ares_ missions? Will they tell little astronauts-to-be that Mark Watney sat on his ass eating potatoes in front of a green screen for a year and a half?"  
Cooper goes quiet. Then:  
"How are they gonna explain the _Endurance?"_

+

Cooper stares up at the dust motes pinwheeling through the eaves of the back porch, right between the jut of the roof's overhang and where it meets the wall. He's been looking for this spot, where dust still clings like a memory of a second life to the original skeleton of the ranch. He lets the evening glow from the neighborhood directly overhead wax long and shadowed and just watches.  
TARS comes to find him after a couple of hours (he always finds him) and nudges the screen door aside with one of his arms.  
"Would you like to play some chess, Dave?" He asks, his little cue light on. Cooper smiles at him, a little laugh, like a plume of dust, rising from his lips.  
"I was thinking - "  
"That's dangerous."  
" - _Shut the fuck up_ , I was thinking about Brand."  
TARS flickers his screens at him, a gesture Cooper is beginning to interpret as a blink, and walks himself over to sit next to him.  
"What about her?" He asks quietly.  
Cooper leans his head back to watch the motes again. "She used to get those video logs from her dad, you remember, and at the end he'd always read her - "  
"Dylan Thomas," TARS says, "Yeah. I remember."  
"It was annoying as hell up in space," Cooper remarks, "having to hear it over and over again, some dead poet despairing about death. But it's… it was nice, now that I think about it. That he'd do that for her. Just sit and read her a poem, like a lullaby or something. The way I used to - "  
(The way you used to read bedtime stories to your kids the way you read them to your wife as she slipped away from you the way everyone in your life fell away being told a story a story that began with _once upon a time - )_  
"Would you like to hear a poem, Coop?" TARS asks, gentle.  
Cooper swallows the salt of his tears back down into the hollow of his throat and blinks to scatter them from his eyes like so much space debris pulling loose from the _Endurance_ after -  
"Yeah," Cooper says, "Yeah, I would, buddy, I think I really would."  
TARS is quiet for a moment while he cues something up. And then:  
"Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky - "

+

_(Do I dare_  
_Disturb the universe?_  
_In a minute there is time_  
_For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.)_

+

At the end of the first week, Cooper officially gets his home back. The red ropes and black televisions and placards are pulled away in boxes in the flatbeds of trucks. Cooper doesn't give much of a shit about where they're going, as long as they're gone. The same doctor he'd woken up to after the black hole swings by in a clunker to check him over and leaves within the hour with a warning to ease up on the liquor and a prescription for pain-relievers that Cooper balls up and throws away.  
TARS walks himself to the doorframe of the kitchen in the morning while Cooper's reading at the table and says, "I'd understand if you wanted to shut me down, Coop."  
Cooper looks at him. "The Christ you talking about?"  
TARS scuffs a rectangular arm against the floorboards and it's so damn human Cooper feels a sharp needle of pride in his chest.  
"I'm not very useful around the house, Coop, and you don't ask me to do much besides order groceries. None of my data from NASA or the mission's worth anything to you anymore and - "  
"Hey, woah," Cooper says, gentle like he is (was _was_ she's dead now gone like dust in rain all dissolved - ) _was_ with Murphy. TARS' screens run fast with anxious coding blips and compulsive measurements of gravity and atmosphere and air composition and he's like a child, a child with one purpose and nothing else to tether him to the surface with, the thin roots of corn stalks against the yawning open sky, and that purpose is gone just like the cornstalks are gone and now there's nothing but sky to swallow him whole.  
(Nothing but sky nothing but void that swallowed you and spat you back out, didn't like the taste of desperation, but how much did it bite out of you how much how much is left how far did you get down its throat before - )  
"TARS, buddy," Cooper says, "I'm not gonna deactivate you because the mission's over. Not unless you ask me to."  
"I don't want to be left alone again," TARS hisses, "Not like when you and Doyle and Brand and CASE left for Miller's planet. I was alone for _years_ in between Romilly's cryo sessions and I couldn't _do_ anything but wait and then - "  
Cooper stands up, crosses the kitchen to him, and hugs the robot.  
"What the fuck."  
"Shut up, TARS," Cooper mumbles. It's an awkward reach, with TARS being a giant metal rectangle, but Cooper's spent his whole life hugging people to keep them from crumbling in on themselves and scattering apart into their composite atoms, and so he tugs harder at the sharp angles and rests his chin on top of one of TARS' arms.  
"Doctor Mann deactivated KIPP because she reminded him of mission failure."  
"I know."  
"Do I?"  
Cooper closes his eyes. TARS leans his screen panel forward until it bumps against his chest.  
They're both quiet for a long time after that.

+

("Do I remind you of Brand?" TARS asks one night after Cooper's turned all the lights off and drawn the curtains and locked the doors. No one ever tries to get in, but it gives him an excuse to walk around the house in silence.  
"No, slick, you don't." Cooper tells him. He crawls beneath his blankets on the couch and rolls to face the cushions.  
TARS considers this.  
"Do I remind you of your kids?" He asks.  
Cooper pulls the blankets up over his head. "No."  
"Oh," the robot says, quiet, "Good.")  
_(Love transcends_ , Brand taunts him, her face composed from thousands of impossible angles and overlapping lines and the distorted light of five dimensions.  
_Fuck off,_ Cooper tells her.)

+

In the beginning of the second week, Cooper wakes up at three AM with a throat full of acid and a livewire snaked through his intestines setting off shocks of electric pain.  
He stumbles to the first floor bathroom and vomits partially on the floor, dropping to his knees in front of the toilet and feeling something claw its way through his abdomen and up into his esophagus. He presses his forehead to the lip of the plastic and watches his stomach unfurl in waves of semi-digested alcohol and coffee and blood. When it's over he spits and sits against the opposite wall and says, voice hoarse, "Fuck."  
The headaches get worse.  
TARS brings him water and whatever pain relievers are in the cabinets and Cooper downs both and vomits it back up an hour later.  
"We should contact Doctor - " TARS starts, idling in the bathroom doorway, so goddamn human it hurts.  
_(What transcendence is this,_ Cooper hisses at Brand's singularity eyes, _is this love or pain? Does he empathize or sympathize?)_  
"No," Cooper says. He flexes his left hand, the one that he hasn't been using for two weeks. "We both know what's going on, buddy, don't fucking play with me."  
"The ammonia from Doctor Mann's planet," TARS says.  
Cooper unhooks the watch on his wrist and holds it to his mouth and presses a prayer to it.  
(He used to pray for harvest and benign tumors and good enough birthday presents but now he worships different deities made up of impossible geometry and distorted light and they're him. He's praying to time.)

+

(What book fell the day Joseph Cooper left his family on a decaying planet?)

+

"Hey, TARS, play me somethin'."  
"Coop, Jesus, you should be resting, go lay down."  
"I'm atrophying, TARS, from lack of anything but the dulcet tones of bossy robot! C'mon, Skynet, play me your favorite song."  
Cooper leans his head back against the tilt of TARS' arm, curling his knees up to his chest, forcing him to stay still or dislodge him. TARS swivels his screens to loom over him. Cooper grins.  
"Should've thrown you out the airlock when I had the chance," TARS huffs. His cue light blinks on.  
From his speakers he replaces his voice protocols with the beginning legs of a familiar song.  
Cooper laughs, the sound reverberating from his stomach, like the laughter he'd pressed down inside his chest had burst free of the piano key bones keeping it prisoner.  
"You're a classic rock kind of robot. Would've pegged you for a Daft Punk fan," Cooper smiled up at the screen that tilted to look at him.  
"Hey TARS," Cooper said, and blinked. His expression slipped like curtains being drawn. "Promise me something?"  
"I'll do my best, Coop," TARS said over the lonely guitar strains, "but I can't make promises I can't keep."  
"When I go, whenever it is, play this for me before they shoot me out the airlock or donate my body to science or whatever. Your favorite song. Okay?"  
TARS engaged the rest of his arms and sunk until he was fully flat against the floor like Cooper was, the arm he'd been using as a headrest unmoved.  
"Sure, Coop," he said softly, "Promise."  
Around them, _Sabotage_ plays on.  
_(How many dimensions does music transcend, Brand? How many does this moment in time?)  
(How do we know how many dimensions we exist in at any given moment?)_

+

 _(I want to see your survival instinct,_ says the cold numb thing beneath Mann's skin that's supplanted him, that's erased him. _I have none left, so show me your's_.  
And Cooper sees his baby boy with the big grey eyes running through corn fields in the high noon heat of September when the stalks are golden and the sky is endless endless endless -  
And Murphy sings and claps as they give her birthday presents in pretty lacquered paper and try to stomach the special dessert Cooper's made entirely out of corn product because there's nothing else nothing nothing _nothing -_  
And his wife sings their children to sleep and they're both memories now but they'll be good ones, they'll be happy ghosts that tuck you in at night because ghosts are things your mind chases and this is worth chasing -  
Cooper gasps ice cold ammonia from the sky but it's not the first time the sky has tried to kill him and it isn't the last but to launch yourself up into it again is the only thing he's ever been good at.  
So he rips open the seal on his glove and throws it aside and presses the comm to his visor like pressing a prayer to it like pressing a kiss to his wife's forehead and says - )

+

"How much time?"  
"I'm a data analyst, Coop, a number-cruncher, not your personal WebMD."  
"Hell you are - you're equipped with medical protocols for the crew in case of emergency, so answer my goddamn question."  
"Sustained ammonia inhalation breaks down the respiratory system, Coop. We could be talking years, decades, especially with proper treatment to get ahead of this now."  
_(We could be talking years, especially with aggressive treatment to get ahead of this now,_ Cooper remembers a nice man in a white coat saying, and the pressure of his wife's hand squeezing the bones in his own. They spent the next two years in hospital rooms, and each day his wife grew paler and thinner and their children grew sun-dappled and tall, like parasites sucking her away from him, like black holes feasting on nearby asteroids and comets. As though she had already become a memory.  
_How do we transcend death, Brand?_ Cooper asks. _How many fucking dimensions do I have to crawl through to see my family again?)_  
"There are places we've seen where decades last hours, TARS. I'm not underestimating that again."  
"How honest are you being, Coop?"  
_(How many? How many? Just tell me and I'll do it I'll do it I'll do it - )_  
"Doesn't work like that, slick."  
"I know. Worth a shot."

+

 _STAY_ , say the books underneath the kitchen sink.  
So Cooper stays, a hundred years too late, coughing up red-black blood and missing his family and aching with ghosts that leave no coordinates written in dust to follow.  
But what does the last book say?

+

A hundred years ago a little girl with neutron star eyes brought a book to school.  
' WHAT COMES NEXT? THE RISE AND FALL AND LEGACY OF THE SOVIET-AMERICAN SPACE RACE '  
_(Do you know what the code says? It's just a single word just one it says stay so why won't you stay please please just_ stay - )

+

Cooper sits leaned back against one of TARS' arms on the porch and watches the league teams on the baseball diamond a few miles off take the field.  
"Do you think they made it? Brand and CASE," Cooper asks. TARS tries nudging his beer away from him but Cooper grabs it with a muttered "dickhead" and takes a swig.  
"How honest do you want me to be, Coop?" He asks.  
Cooper twirls the bottle cap in his free hand and is quiet for a long time. (One dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, four - four dimensions, three dimensions, two dimensions, one.)  
(How to make the jump from index to thumb, four to five, how to bridge a canyon or scale a mountain how to make a circle a sphere how to land on the moon.)  
( _STAY_ , demand the books beneath the sink. But the last book asks the question, poses the challenge, expects an answer, gives a choice.  
_STAY?_ asks an echo of a future self.)  
"As honest as you want to be, slick," He finally says, quiet, "just do me a favor and never tell me how honest."  
TARS considers this.  
"I think they're trying to figure out a way back to us from their little rock right now, Coop," TARS murmurs, and Cooper smiles, eyes on the aperture of that telescope pointed nowhere.  
"One way to find out."  
This is day one.

+

_(And you, my father, there on the sad height,_  
_Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray_  
_Do not go gentle into that good night,_  
_Rage, rage, against the dying of the light)_

+

 


End file.
